In recent years, the number of wireless access points (hereinafter also referred to simply as “access point(s)”) has been rapidly increasing due to the widespread use of various wireless communication systems such as mobile phone communication networks (e.g. LTE (Long Term Evolution)) and wireless LANs. Terminal apparatuses such as smartphones can select a desired access point from multiple nearby access points as appropriate for wireless communications.
However, when a terminal apparatus randomly selects a wireless access point to be used for communication, establishing a connection sometimes becomes difficult due to traffic congestion at the selected access point, or even after establishing a connection to the selected access point, a desired transmission speed sometimes cannot be achieved in the wireless communication network depending on wireless communication quality or available bandwidth.
Examples of known techniques for properly selecting a base station such as an access point of wireless LAN or a mobile phone base station include a wireless communication system in which a terminal apparatus measures communication quality between the terminal apparatus and each base station, and transmits communication quality information along with measurement location information to a management server, and in which the management server creates a communication quality database indicating communication qualities associated with respective base stations for each location in the area based on the received communication quality information and measurement location information, edits map information for the terminal apparatus or the base station, determines the reliability of the map information, and transmits the map information and the determined reliability to the terminal apparatus so that, when performing data communication, the terminal apparatus can select the base station for communications by weighting the communication quality information and the map information considering the received reliability. (See Patent Document 1)